I keep collecting open source server-side software for doing things for free in the academic world - and LimeSurvey is definitely one of the jewels in the collection." -Konstantin Tovstiadi in his blog

The LimeSurvey project is looking for volunteers who would like to help in an Open Source project on a long-term base :-). We have three positions that need to be filled, all of which require only little/none coding experience, but require about 10 hours of work every week.

Translations Community Manager

The translation community manager takes care of translators and translations. The important part of this is to make translations of the application and the documentation alot better by motivating existing and new translators, give incentives to translate, look for new tools to make translations better in general. You should be an experienced LimeSurvey user.

Incident Manager

The incident manager takes care of incidents in the LimeSurvey project in general, be it with the application or the website. He monitors new bug reports, does a first filtering, ask the reporters for details and tries to reproduce the issue. After the incident proves to be a really issue he assigns these to coders or translators. He reports to the project lead and if escalates things if a general problem seems to show up.

Documentation Manager

The documentation manager takes care of everything documentation related. He works together with the translations manager, as translations a re a big part of the documentation. He also makes sure that documentation is well structure and organized. If needed he will restructure or rewrite existing documentation. He will also look for ways to get the community involved with the documentation so in general it gets better.

If you are interested in any of these volunteer positions, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with the following details:

Which position are you interested in and why?

Short CV

Details of your past experience with LimeSurvey and past involvement with the LimeSurvey community

We're pleased to announce the release of 1.92 RC5 which you can download it from here.

It fixes all of the reported bugs in 1.92 RC4, especially some issues discovered with multilingual support. We expect this to be the final release candidate before releasing 1.92 stable near the end of February.

1.92 includes many new and improved features, plus dozens of bug fixes. The wiki documentation has been updated to clarify which features are new. You can also review the old 1.92 RC announcements for details of the main new and improved features.

So, please test 1.92 RC5 and let us know if you find any issues (by reporting them to the bugtracker).

The LimeSurvey team is pleased to announce the release of 1.92 RC4, which can be downloaded now.

This release resolves over 50 issues reported about 1.92 RC3. It also adds a new set of CSS classes available within templates so that you can tailor how you display the different types of validation messages. You can find more details about this in our documentation wiki.

Unless any truly major issues are discovered with 1.92 RC4, we are planning to release 1.92 stable on February 27th. So, please test out this version and report any bugs you find via the bug tracker.

The LimeSurvey team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.92 RC3. You can download it here.

It fixes all bugs identified in the 1.92 RC2 release, plus adds several new features including:

Default values now available for the following question types: Date, Short/Long/Huge Text, Multiple ShortText, Multiple Numerical

array_filter now also available for multiple_numeric and multiple_short_text

min/max_answers - now also available for all array types, multiple_numeric and multiple_short_text

min/max_num_value_n - now also available for multiple_numeric

new question attributes to call validation functions for each sub-question

Improved validation display - no more pop-ups. If validations rules fail, the validation tip is shown in red (it turns to green if it is OK). For questions with multiple text entry fields, each invalid field will have its background color changed to red to indicate that there is a problem.

print answers at the end only shows relevant questions

several fixes to better ensure support for existing surveys

Furthermore, we have updated the wiki documentation to describe how to use the many new features available in 1.92, especially Expression Manager and the new features described above.

We hope this will be the final release candidate before a stable release, so please download and test it. If you find any bugs, please report them on the bug tracker.

The Google Code in 2011 contest is nearly over and once more it was a great success for Limesurvey. Besides lots of awesome work done by our student porting the upcoming 2.0 version to the "Yii" MVC framework some further work was done which we want to present here:

1. One of LimeSurvey’s Google Code-In 2011 projects that didn't include actual programming involved analyzing the statistical data about visits to the www.limesurvey.org website using Google Analytics. LimeSurvey uses Google Analytics to collect a wealth of information about the countries its users are from, their language preferences, their browser preferences, and what pages they view. Full results from the project can be found here.The data from Google Analytics showed that in the last two years the number of monthly visits to www.limesurvey.org have nearly doubled. In the month of October, the website was visited by people in 185 different countries. Firefox is the most popular browser among users by a large margin. The most common source of visitors is the Google search engine, and the most visited pages other than the main page include the English instructions, demo, and downloads page.

2. One of our students developed a small survey for us to collect more information about the question type usage (fill it out here). The results were analysed by another studend and can be looked at here.

5. Other tasks included translation updates of the most important manual pages to German, French and Spanish or extending existing English documentation.Feel free to extend the first version of the Limesurvey glossary we created and check out the new "How to create a good survey" tips (please add your thought there!).

We want to thank all students who have helped us, you did a great job!

The LimeSurvey team wishes you a very happy new year. 2012 is going to be a very exciting year for all the community since we are finalizing the 1.92 version with its lot of outstanding new features based on the powerful Expression Manager engine developed by our core developer TMSWhite (see announcement for the 1.92RC1 release).

At the same time we are actively working on porting LimeSurvey 2.0 to the YII framework. Let me thank all the Google Code-in participants who are working on this project, their commitment and skills are a fantastic help.

So let's start this year by the release of LimeSurvey 1.92 release candidate 2. In this version, we have fixed all of the known bugs with 1.92 RC1 (especially the installer problem) and we are confident that the 1.92 stable release is soon to come. It is now time for you to give it a try (download here), you won't regret it. As always, should you find bugs, please report them to our bugtracker.

The LimeSurvey team is pleased to announce the availability of release candidate 1 (RC1) for version 1.92 of LimeSurvey. You can download it here. This version is based on the 1.91+ code base, but completely replaces the survey-taking logic with Expression Manager (EM). Although this is a complete re-write of the survey-taking portion of the code, it has been thoroughly tested and we expect a rapid migration from Release Candidate to true release status.

In addition to being fully backwards compatible with 1.91+ (see the one caveat below), EM provides the following new features, several of which have been on the wish list for some time:

Use complex equations to decide if a question is visible/relevant or not (a successor to conditions, supporting much more complex logic).

Use Group-level relevance to show/hide entire groups without needing to set conditions on each question

Use advanced piping, micro-tailoring, and conditional logic to tailor questions that are visible.

Eliminate the need for most custom JavaScript - computations, scoring and tailoring are done by EM.

Run surveys with complex conditions and piping in All-in-one mode, even if highly dynamic.

Run large, complex surveys faster, even if they contain many conditions.

Use the Question/Group Navigation Index even with complex conditions.

Jump forward in Navigation Index, re-validating all intervening steps and stopping if any are invalid.

Auto-convert Conditions to Relevance - so you can still use the Conditions editor if you like it.

Re-order and/or delete any questions or groups, even if they contain complex conditions.

Use EM syntax-highlighting to quickly validate and debug your work. All variables are color coded to indicate whether they are set on the current, prior, or later pages (or not at all). Tool-tips show the question code, SGQA, question text, and enumerated answer choices. Clicking on the variable opens a new tab that lets you edit that question (also letting you quickly navigate cascading relevance logic).

Use the new Survey Logic File view to show all of the key content and logic in the survey. This includes all group, question, sub-question, and answer codes, values (if assessment mode), and text; all defaults; all question attributes; and all relevance and validation logic. This file uses the click-able syntax highlighting and shows which questions have errors (e.g. bad syntax, undeclared variables, or re-used question codes).

Use most EM-related functions and attributes in your own custom JavaScript, you don't need to re-invent EM functionality

One Caveat. LimeSurvey 1.92 is fully backwards-compatible with 1.91+ except for less-than / greater-than comparisons against empty values. One of the LimeSurvey demo surveys uses a set of conditions that translates to this relevance equation: {(age < 16) or (age == 20) or ... or (age == 80)}. In LimeSurvey 1.91+, (age < 16) is FALSE when there is no answer (the value is blank). However, in LimeSurey 1.92, (age < 16) is TRUE when there is no answer, since both PHP and JavaScript treat blank as 0 in mathematical comparisons. Thus, 1.91+ would hide that question when age was unanswered, but 1.92 would show it. We went to great pains to prevent this, but since we needed to have the Expressions generate identical results in PHP and JavaScript, there was no way to make 1.92 treat "" < 16 as FALSE. Fortunately, there is an easy work-around for this. If you want (age < 16) to be FALSE, then use this expression instead: {(!is_empty(age) and age < 16)}. You can use the new Survey Logic File view to quickly identify and fix any such comparisons in your survey.

The best way to get started is to download and install 1.92, and play with the included survey, /docs/demosurveys/limesurvey2_sample_survey_english.lss, which demonstrates the majority of EM's functionality.

Please contact us via the Forum or IRC with any questions/comments.If you find any bugs, please report them on the Bug Tracker.

Also note, for those of you watching the development of 2.0, EM will be included in it too. At present, the version of EM in 1.92 is considerably more robust and feature complete than the version in 2.0a. However, as the Yii port progresses over the next several months, these new EM features will be ported to Yii and the 2.x branch.